When the theme is collaboration, labs get moving

UCLA Health Most people have, at one time or another, packed up all their belongings and lugged them to a new environment — a first dorm room, a bigger apartment, a different house. Few people, though, have had to pack up multiple million-dollar scientific instruments, boxes upon boxes of test tubes, pipettes and beakers, and scores of experiments at various stages of completion. Hundreds of researchers at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA recently did just that.The reason was simple: School leaders wanted dramatically amplify the environment of collaboration that unites multidisciplinary teams in six research themes.The logistics were not: Coordinating the move of 33 labs into a central location — in just longer than a month and with minimum disruptions and downtime for ongoing experiments — is, by any measure, a tall order.The move into the renovated South Tower of the Center for Health Sciences — completed this summer and just in time for a new academic year — was more than five years in the making. It was precipitated by a fundamental rethinking of how best to use research space, beginning with the creation of the six Unified Research Themes: cancer; cardiovascular health; immunology, inflammation, infection and transplantation research; metabolism; neuroscience; and regenerative medicine.“The idea of having research themes started in about 2012, and it came from the realization that there were so many big problems that we could address in biomedic...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news